ruminations on the evils of the ice cream man

The bad thing about spring is the return of the ice cream man. I hate the ice cream man. I have evil fantasies about taking his jingly jangly bells and shoving them so far up his ass that his ears start ringing. It's not even one guy. We have the dueling trucks around here. They circle the block morning, noon and night, each one turning up their sound system louder on each pass down my street.

There's Mr. Softy, Doug's Truck o' Ice Cream and some ominous looking white truck that I swear plays the theme from "Rosemary's Baby" while it circles the block.

When I was a child, I thought of ice cream men as evil beings sent to earth by Satan to ply children with goodies into joining the force of the dark side. Those bells and happy recordings you heard on the speakers was just a mask for subliminal messages, meant to hypnotize into becoming one of the devil's minions, and then you would be put to work selling cigarettes to minors and selling Elvis albums to old ladies.

it turns out they aren't satan's helpers at all, just capitalists in action. They fight for our allegiance with specials and discounts and the coolest, trendiest ice cream ever. Twenty five flavors of gelato. Ice cream cones coated with peanut butter sauce. Yellow, gooey, Pikachu shaped pops.

One flavor is more disgusting than the next. The Rugrats ice pops leave purple and yellow stains on the sidewalk. The Flinstone push up pops taste like Triaminic.

And yet, the kids run to the ice cream as if he were the Pied Piper of Sweet Treats. They eat these disgusting, fake flavored, stain-inducing pops and beg for more.

I wonder what life on our block would be like during the summer if our only ice cream truck was driven by a man from Japan who imported all his goods from his home country.

When I was young, we had to go to the corner store for ice cream. No trucks around here.

I do remember when my kids were small we would wait for the ice cream truck to come around our housing area in Germany. It was driven by an elderly man who spoke no English, but he had handpacked Italian ice cream every day. No fancy pops or cartoon characters. That was 25 years ago and I suppose that's all gone now.

But if it isn't, here's a tip. Don't order the Lemon! Unless you enjoy walking around with your mouth puckered for the next two hours.

I say DEATH TO THE ICE CREAM MAN!!!!, that fucking bastard always wakes me up in the morning with his annoying, cheesy, rinky-dink crap music. I say we revolt, I'm sending my pitt bull after the ice cream truck next time he bothers me, what the hell are they doing anyway? I thought there was some law against disturbing the peace, He's disturbing MY peace. I don't know about the rest of you guys but the ice cream guy that circles our neighborhood noon and night is actually disturbing, some fat ass Bulgarian with a unibrow and who has a constant runny nose, that's disgusting! Plus I hear a lot of ice cream truck drivers are petifiles too, so I say raid and pillage every ice cream truck you see, sick your dogs at them, slash their tires, rip out their crappy speakers, shed the wires, beat the truck with a baseball bat and take all the damn icecream you want!

I say sell poison icecream to the disgusting greedy, dirty little children with their snot covered faces who feast like pigs upon artificially flavored shit unfit to feed rats, kill the nasty children, and the sausage-fingered petifile fat man, ball-scratcher, I say we must rid the earth of such pestilence, the ice cream man is the anticrist, death to him! We will sacrifice him and drink his blood, and then go out and by some haagendaas coffee ice cream and get fat. I love haagendaas coffee ice cream don't you?

You don't know the horror (except for Emily) of the Mexican bread truck. The blaring horn, a sound that should only be used to announce the execution of a particularly terrible serial killer, along with the brats going out on parents orders with imperfectly memorized shopping lists. A truly disgusting ritual.

I think you were scarred by "Chitty Chitt Bang Bang". Remember that evil guy with the wagon? "Candy... gumdrops... lollipops... Where are all the little children?" then it turns into a cage and he takes them away! Ack!